Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.